Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Contents

1. Translator’s Introduction 18 min 3

   John Sibree (1857) recommends the lectures as the most accessible entry to Hegel's system, explains how he has rendered difficult terms (Geist as “Spirit”, Sittlichkeit as “morality” of custom as distinct from Moralität), and sets out the book's theme: history as the progressive realisation of rational freedom, from external authority to freely recognised law.

2. Charles Hegel’s Preface 8 min 2

   Hegel's son Karl explains how the second edition (1840) was put together: Eduard Gans had compiled the first (1837) from students' notes of the lectures given between 1822 and 1831; Karl added Hegel's own manuscripts and notes from the earlier courses, to show more of the material Hegel had worked through and how his plan changed.

3. Introduction 3 h 46 min 29

   Hegel distinguishes original history (written by witnesses), reflective history (compilations, pragmatic and critical history) and philosophical history, which approaches the facts with one assumption: that reason governs the world. Its subject is Spirit, whose essence is freedom; world history is “the progress of the consciousness of freedom”, from the Oriental world, which knows only that one is free, through the Greek and Roman, which know that some are, to the Germanic Christian world, which knows that all are. Spirit works through human passions and the “world-historical individuals” (Caesar, Napoleon) whose private aims carry out its purpose, the “cunning of reason”. Its realisation is the State, the union of individual and universal will, with religion, art and philosophy as its higher expressions.

4. Geographical Basis of History 1 h 6 min 11

   The natural setting of history. Hegel holds that the true theatre of history is the temperate zone; he dismisses America as a land of the future without a history yet, and Africa, in passages now notorious, as outside history altogether. He divides the Old World into upland plateaus (nomads), river valleys (settled civilisations) and coastlands (trade and the sea), the last opening the way to freedom.

5. Classification of Historic Data 20 min 5

   History moves from East to West, like the sun. Hegel likens its stages to the ages of a life: the Oriental world as the childhood of history, the Greek as its youth, the Roman as its manhood, the Germanic as its old age, which in Spirit means maturity. Each world corresponds to a stage of freedom: one, some, all.

6. Part I The Oriental World 13 min 1

   In the Orient, Spirit is still immersed in nature. The ruler alone is free, as head of a patriarchal whole in which morality is external command, law and religion are not separated, and individuals have no inner, subjective freedom. Hegel sets out the variants: China's unchanging state, India's division of castes, and Persia, where Spirit first opposes itself to nature.

7. I.I China 1 h 4 min 6

   China is the oldest state and stands outside the development of history. Everything rests on the family and on the Emperor as father of his people; government by examined officials, laws and punishments is external and minute, and there is no inner moral freedom, honour or independent religion. Hegel describes its science, writing, arts and religion as practical and unspeculative, a judgement that reflects the European sources available to him.

8. I.II India 1 h 22 min 5

   India represents the “dream” of Spirit: imagination dissolves everything into the divine, Brahman, while society is frozen into castes fixed by birth. Hegel sees no history and no state in the proper sense, only despotism without a principle, cruelty and degradation, and judges the Hindu spirit harshly from the colonial and missionary literature he read.

9. I.II India: Buddhism 14 min 3

   Lamaism and Buddhism, in Tibet, Mongolia and further Asia, mark a step beyond India: God is conceived in a human form, the Lama, and the principle of inwardness (nothingness, the withdrawal of the mind into itself) appears, though still abstractly.

10. I.III Persia 1 h 13 min 6

    Persia is the first historical people, because it is the first in which the principle of light, the Good of Zoroaster's religion, stands against nature as a spiritual universal. The Persian Empire unites varied peoples under a ruler without suppressing their particularity. Hegel surveys the Zend people, Assyria and Babylon, Phoenicia, and Judaea, where Spirit is first purified into a God who is pure thought.

11. I.III Egypt 1 h 11 min 6

    Egypt is the land of riddles: its religion of animal gods, the dead and the sphinx shows Spirit struggling to break free of nature without succeeding. The Persian Empire, which absorbed it, gives way to Greece because it could not unite its parts in one Spirit; the riddle of the Sphinx is solved by the Greek “Know thyself”.

12. Part II The Greek World 5 min 2

    Among the Greeks “we feel ourselves at home”: here Spirit becomes conscious of itself in free individuality, still bound to nature in the form of beauty. Hegel calls Greek life the youth of humanity.

13. II.I The Elements of the Greek Spirit 43 min 3

    The elements of Greek Spirit: a divided, mountainous land of islands and coasts open to the sea; the mixing of peoples and of foreign influences, which the Greeks transformed into their own; and their relation to nature as something to be interpreted, the root of their oracles and gods.

14. II.II Phases of Individuality Æsthetically Conditioned 27 min 2

    The individuality of the Greeks takes aesthetic form: the human body made into a work of art in games and festivals, the gods given human beauty in sculpture and poetry (the “objective work of art”), and religion in which the divine is seen in human shape.

15. II.II The Political Work of Art 1 h 9 min 14

    The State as a “political work of art”: democracy as the form fitting a free but unreflective morality based on custom, slavery its condition. Hegel follows the Persian Wars, Athens under Pericles, the very different Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, Socrates, in whom subjective reflection begins to dissolve custom, and Alexander's empire, which carried Greek culture to the East.

16. II.III The Fall of the Greek Spirit 7 min 1

    The decline of Greece: individual interests and reflection undermine the unity of the city, Greece falls to Macedonian and Roman power, and its principle passes into a wider world.

17. Part III The Roman World 12 min 3

    Rome begins with Napoleon's remark that politics is now what fate was for the ancients. The Roman world is the manhood of history: the abstract universal of the State, to which individuals are subordinated, against the abstract freedom of the person as an owner of property.

18. III.I Rome to the Time of the Second Punic War 1 h 4 min 4

    Rome's origins in a band of robbers and its harsh, prosaic spirit: the strict paternal family, religion as a matter of useful observance, the struggle of patricians and plebeians, and the growth of law and of the legal person.

19. III.II Rome from the Second Punic War to the Emperors 21 min 3

    From the Second Punic War, conquest brings wealth and the collapse of republican virtue; the civil wars of the great individuals (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar) end with Caesar, who abolished the republic's contradiction and showed, Hegel says, that history repeats an event until it is recognised as necessary.

20. III.III Rome under the Emperors 12 min 2

    Under the Emperors, the private person is everything and the State a mere power over isolated individuals; philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism) retreats into inner indifference to the world, preparing the need for a spiritual reconciliation.

21. III.III Christianity 52 min 7

    Christianity is the turning point of world history: God revealed as Spirit and as human in Christ, and the infinite worth of every person as an object of divine grace. The principle that “all are free” takes centuries to enter the world, through the Church's growth and doctrine.

22. III.III The Byzantine Empire 14 min 2

    The Byzantine Empire shows Christianity held in an unspiritual, decaying state: theological controversy, court intrigue and the circus factions, with no renewal of the world.

23. Part IV The German World 15 min 5

    The German Spirit is the spirit of the new world, whose aim is the realisation of absolute truth as the self-determination of freedom. Hegel divides its history into three periods: the Germanic peoples' reception of Christianity up to Charlemagne, the Middle Ages, and the modern time since the Reformation.

24. IV.I The Elements of the Christian German World 52 min 10

    The barbarian migrations; the Germanic peoples' sense of personal freedom and loyalty; the rise of Islam, which Hegel treats as the abstract enthusiasm of the East; and Charlemagne's empire, the first attempt at a Christian state.

25. IV.II The Middle Ages: The Feudality and the Hierarchy 1 h 4 min 5

    The Middle Ages: the break-up of the State into feudal private relations, the Church's rise as a spiritual power that becomes worldly, and the antagonism of the two, in which “all was contradiction”.

26. IV.II The Crusades 25 min 5

    The Crusades sought Christ in the sepulchre, the sensuous Now, and found it empty: the lesson that the divine must be sought in Spirit. The chapter covers the religious orders, chivalry and the rise of the towns.

27. IV.II The Transition from Feudalism to Monarchy 35 min 4

    The rise of monarchy against feudal lords, the growth of towns, commerce and art, and the decline of the Church, which prepare the modern world.

28. IV.III The Modern Time: The Reformation 42 min 11

    The Reformation, provoked by the corruption of the Church and the sale of indulgences, made faith a matter of the individual's own spirit and conscience: Luther's principle of subjective freedom, which Hegel calls the “all-enlightening Sun” following the dawn of the Renaissance.

29. IV.III Influence of the Reformation on Political Development 30 min 4

    How the Reformation reshaped politics: the separation of Church and State, the formation of nation-states and the wars of religion, the Thirty Years' War and the rise of Prussia, and the transformation of the state into an order based on reason.

30. IV.III The Eclaircissement and Revolution 54 min 25

    The Enlightenment and the French Revolution: thought claims the right to judge everything, and the principle of the free will is applied to the state. Hegel admires the Revolution as a “glorious mental dawn” but argues that abstract freedom without institutions led to the Terror. He ends with the reconciliation of freedom and state in the Protestant states of Germany, and calls world history the true theodicy, the justification of God in history.